From Jane Hart, Founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies - the largest independent learning site on the Web

21 May 2009

Wolfram Alpha

A number of people have emailed suggesting I blog about Wolfram Alpha. I haven't done so up to now because it has had so much coverage that I didn't think I could add any more to what had already been said. So in this posting I am going to link to three articles about how it compares with Google.

First of all, WolframAlpha calls itself "a computational knowledge engine" rather than a search engine. It's long-term goal is "to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone".

First, I think it's important to realise that it is vastly different from the usual 'search engine'. You brought this out in your post. It pays to check out the introduction by Stephen Wolfram.

Second, I recently entered the chemical name ammonium sulfate and found that the structures that were returned related to ammonia and sulfuric acid but that it said nothing about ammonium or sulfate ions. It also gave reference to IUPAC which showed incorrect and inappropriate information. Similar related but inaccurate responses were obtained with other chemical names.

WolframAlpha is still in its infancy. I think it is important to give feedback in the facility at the base of the screen if we are to assist this new device.

To get a 3D graph on Wolframalpha I entered the following:
plot x^2 + y^2, x=1..10, y=1..10
I got a neat 3D graph. I then entered
plot x^3 + y^3, x=1..10, y=1..10
I got the same 3D graph!
When I looked closely I realized that both were wrong.
Along the y-z plane should be a curve line corresponding to
x=0, y=1, z=1; x=0, y=2, z=8; x=0, y=3, z=27; etc (for cube case) ... I sent a message to the site but have not received
a reply.